Pakistan: a Hard Country by Anatol Lieven: review

Peter Oborne celebrates Pakistan: A Hard Country by Anatol Lieven, a
work that dispels the myth of Pakistan as a country on the brink.

The crisis in North Africa and the Middle East has driven Pakistan out of the headlines, but this is surely only a temporary lull. Cursed by nuclear weapons, home to al-Qaeda, victim of several raging insurgencies and notorious for a chronically unstable political structure – most Western experts continue to view Pakistan as the most dangerous country in the world.

Pakistan: a Hard Country by Anatol Lieven

So this book by Anatol Lieven could hardly be more timely. Lucid and well informed, he deals carefully with all Pakistan’s well-known problems. And one of the joys of this nicely written volume is that it avoids the hysteria and partial judgment that disfigure much contemporary writing on the subject.

Above all, it emanates a deep affection bordering on love for unfortunate, beleaguered, magical Pakistan. Lieven’s research takes him to an army cantonment in Quetta, boar-hunting in the Punjab and to a stay in Taliban-dominated Mohmand Agency on the North West Frontier. Lieven, a former foreign correspondent who is now professor of terrorism studies at King's College, London, talks to just about everybody who counts: farmers, intelligence officers, judges, clerics, politicians, doctors, soldiers, jihadis.

In the course of this journey he demolishes the neo-conservative narrative that Pakistan is dominated by a mortal struggle between virtuous modernity and rage-filled Islamist conservatism. He insists that Pakistan is not – as Western intelligence agencies, journalists and think tanks believe – a country on the brink. We needn’t worry too much about its nuclear weapons falling into the wrong hands. Pakistan is not about to be taken over by Islamists.

On the contrary, Pakistan is remarkably stable and it is completely daft to compare it to failed states such as Somalia, Congo or Yemen. The key question, Lieven asks, is not why Islamist political movements are so strong in 21st-century Pakistan. It is why they are so weak. His argument is for the most part persuasive. Most Western commentators look for the wrong things. It is certainly true that the institutions imposed by the British before independence – above all parliamentary democracy and the rule of law – are failing.

Related Articles

But that does mean that Pakistan itself is failing? Democracy and the rule of law were imposed by the West and have never taken hold. The big, powerful forces in Pakistan remain the same as ever – family and tribe. It is a profoundly traditional society and Lieven argues that even destabilising forces such as the Taliban are best understood as new manifestations of something very ancient: the implacable hostility to the outside world demonstrated by Pathan tribes since time immemorial.

He quotes Olaf Caroe, the last governor of North West Frontier Province, writing in 1958: “There arose one of those strange and formidable insurrections among the Pathans which from time to time sweep across the frontier mountains like a forest fire.” Taliban leaders are really contemporary versions of warlike figures such as the old Mullah of Hada, who caused such trouble to Winston Churchill and his Malakand Field Force, when the future British prime minister was based on the North West Frontier at the end of the 19th century

This analysis leads to a very instructive paradox. On the one hand Pakistan’s social conservatism frustrates any moves towards liberal democracy or the development of a modern state. In a brilliant section devoted to an exploration of the life of Pakistani politicians, Lieven demonstrates clearly that politicians cannot escape the obligations to family and friends, meaning that they are obliged to reward their dependants and connections upon attaining power.

This client-based structure of Pakistani politics – comparable in certain important respects to Lewis Namier’s famous analysis of 18th-century British politics – is certainly a fundamental obstacle to progress. But this same conservatism also blocks all other movements and ideologies, whether socialism, military dictatorship or radical Islam. Life just carries on.

But this is not grounds for complacency, and Lieven powerfully warns of two potent threats to Pakistan’s stability.

The first and most important of these is climate change. Pakistan is a long, thin country that charts the course of the Indus river through the desert from the Tibetan plateau to the Arabian Sea. Last year’s catastrophic floods suggest that the ecology of the Indus may be under threat, putting the livelihoods of tens of millions of people at risk. This is something that needs to be urgently addressed.

The second problem is the United States. Anti-Americanism is today a very powerful force in Pakistan and any ground invasion by US troops would cause the country’s feeble institutional structures to collapse and turn the army against the West.

This is a wonderful book, full of learning, wisdom, humour and common sense.